Editors at the Daily Mail were said to be ‘flabbergasted’ at the results of a Gallop poll published yesterday that showed that nearly half of all Tory voters are too scared to leave their house to vote in the upcoming election.

‘It just isn’t safe to walk out in the street any more,’ said Mrs Mavis Porter, 67, who agreed to be interviewed through her letterbox. ‘If I were so foolhardy as to go out to vote on Election Day, I’m sure to be accosted by an eastern European asylum seeker bent on stealing my job. And what’s he going to do when he finds out I’m retired and don’t have a job? Give me drugs and rape me, that’s what!”

When asked whether she had considered using a postal vote, she stated that the forms had been delivered by ‘one of those Muslim’ postman and were therefore sure to contain either anthrax or explosives.

Sources at the paper say that they are hoping that a series of ‘Pensioners beaten, tortured, raped, killed and mutilated in their own home’ stories will go some way to rectify the damage.